Hasan Minhaj is an Indian-American Muslim comedian, actor, and writer. He is one of the most prominent Muslims in mainstream media. His comedy skits and segments on television often deal with issues pertinent to American Muslims. In the wake of increased Islamophobic rhetoric and discourse that perpetuate anti-Muslim sentiments in the United States, it is necessary to have voices like Minhaj’s represented. Minhaj’s political commentary holds the American government accountable for its policies and attitudes towards Muslims. Through the use of comedy, Minhaj creates a space in which Muslims and other marginalized peoples can cope and heal, and in which people can examine American policy through a critical lens.

Guess that helps explain his comedy stylings. This "gem" from last night's do, for instance:

“We gotta address the elephant that’s not in the room. The leader of our country is not here. And that’s because he lives in Moscow, it is a very long flight. It’d be hard for Vlad to make it. Vlad can’t just make it on a Saturday! As for the other guy, I think he’s in Pennsylvania because he can’t take a joke.”

Could be. Or it could be he didn't want to intrude on the "marginalized peoples" in the throes of all that, um, coping and healing.

A bunch of them havecollaborated on an art exhibit featuring "scrolls filled with words and images born out of interfaith text study."See, if you create your own scrolls, you don't have to deal with stuff that's in an "uncreated" holy book. Stuff like this.Self-devised scrolls can also obviate any need/desire to discuss that pesky Jewish state that's "spoiling" the otherwise impeccable Muslim landscape.Hey, "sisterhood" is powerful, y'all!

Friday, April 28, 2017

The United Nations’ cultural organization UNESCO is to vote next Tuesday, May 2, on a resolution introduced by the Palestinians and several Arab states rejecting Israeli sovereignty over the entire city of Jerusalem, including its majority Jewish western half.

The draft resolution, submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan on behalf of the Palestinians, with input from European Union countries as well, states that “any action taken by Israel, the Occupying Power, to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration on the City of Jerusalem, are illegal and therefore null and void and have no validity whatsoever.”

Both the Israeli government and the Trump Administration, which has frequently hinted that it will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, are reported to be pressuring UNESCO officials and the organization’s 58 member states to postpone or oppose the vote. The struggle is an uphill one, as the Arab states have an automatic majority at UNESCO, and the resolution is expected to go through.

A piece on the Vulture site discusses some of the differences between Margaret Atwood's novel and the HULU sensation. For instance, in the novel, the character named Ofglen ("of Glen") is

described as a little plump with brown hair, and she does not say that she is gay or had a wife. Offred doesn’t tell Ofglen when the Commander wants to see her in private; instead, Ofglen somehow knows through her connections in the rebellion and asks her to find out more. Although she does disappear suddenly one day, Offred is never interrogated about it, and the new Ofglen reveals that her predecessor killed herself “when she saw the van coming for her.” There’s no way to know, of course, if this is true.

On the TV show, however, Ofglen is (my bolds)

played by Alexis Bledel, so she’s not plump at all. She reveals to Offred that she had a wife and daughter in the time before Gilead. Offred tells her about the Commander wanting to see her in secret, and also asks her to find out more about him. In the second episode, we learn that Ofglen was arrested not for her participation in the rebellion, but for her relationship with a Martha. She is charged with “gender treachery” and ultimately pardoned because of her fertility. Instead, she is forced to undergo female circumcision to remove her “unnatural” desires.

In other words, a rite commonly practised in, say, Egypt and Somalia (the provenance of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has written extensively on the subject) has been imported into fictional Gilead, the better to demonstrate how awful, how misogynistic, the Judeo-Christian ethos can be. That said, there's no way anyone on/of the Left would ever situate a dytopian novel or TV show in a real life Muslim dystopia because that would be sooooo "Islamophobic," don't you know.

Update: Clearly, the HULU series has tapped into some mighty dark (dare one call 'em hysterical?) fears. See, for instance, this review by a Guardianistawho 'splains that

what makes But what makes The Handmaid’s Tale so terrifying is not that it’s timely, but that it’s timeless. And after watching seven episodes, what’s been keeping me up at night isn’t the explicit horrors as much as how the show surfaces women’s fear of what everyday sexism really means.

It's been keeping her up at night?Seriously?Get thee to a psychotherapist, stat!Update:More Handmaid hysteria:

What's important to remember while watching The Handmaid's Tale is that feminism is a sociopolitical movement, not a genre of art. A book, a movie, or a show can all be feminist in their themes. They can traffic in the ideas of feminism, but they do not do the work of feminism. We cannot hold online debates about how sex, abortion, or the workplace are portrayed on TV and call that feminism, even when we win them. The wage gap persists. Our rights are under attack. We live in a rape culture. Directing the "feminist" conversation at the screen does nothing to change these facts unless the conversation comes, at some point, off the screen again. So yes, The Handmaid's Tale succeeds on its own, regardless of historical context, as art…and also as a feminist masterpiece. But you don't get feminist participation points for watching it—that's not how it works.

Where its power lies, I think, is in the conversations it might spark, conversations that are desperately needed. We live in a world where it's not always easy or even possible to come right out and state a belief, start a dialogue, question the status quo. But The Handmaid's Tale can function like that bit of gossip in the town square that brings Offred and Ofglen together, it can be the point at which we turn to other women and other people whom we do not know well and enter into a discussion that leads us to the truth.

How can you enter into a discussion that leads you to the truth when the truth is that, due to the veneration of victimhood, you actually can't tell how well off you really are?

"Let's get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catchall vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses..."

Lucky for Paglia she's a Bernie Saunders supporter who didn't vote for Trump. Were she an out-an-out conservative, she would never have been invited to express these views on/by the Ceeb.

Whatever else Trump may be, he is not a puritanical, evangelical Christian who is into publicly executing gays and who wants everyone to have sex with their clothes on. Not that that matters to those with literary pretentions who are determined to conflate Trump's term in office with Margaret Atwood's grim dystopian novel (and now a HULU sensation). With that in mind, Kyle Smith takes a tongue in cheek look at the, er, commonalities between reality and fiction:

As I look out my window in Manhattan, the only women I see are wearing monk’s robes colored scarlet, to emphasize their sin, and topped by nun-like white bonnets. Oranges are scarce in our part of the country due to our ongoing wars with Florida, and since January 20 it has become a regular occurrence to see gay men, priests, and abortionists publicly hanged, their lifeless bodies left black and bruised as a warning to us all. Prophetic? The story is downright unerring.

Just as Margaret Atwood foretold in the 1985 novel from which The Handmaid’s Tale is adapted, all fertile women are being held in prison camps run by domineering Mother Superior types armed with tasers, while men of sufficient rank are simply assigned women to be their sex slaves and helpmeets. Sex these days takes place with both parties almost completely clothed, the women silent and unmoving, the men muttering ritualistic Bible references.

And hey, who hasn’t noticed all the protest marches that ended with government troops opening fire? Or the regime-ordered group executions (partici-cutions, in Handmaid-speak) whereby accused people were beaten to death at the hands of vicious mobs? Or the many brave martyrs shot trying to cross the border from Maine into Canada? Or the Stalinist-style surveillance system tracking our every move? Or the way you can be Tasered for referring to people as “gay” rather than “gender traitors”? Of course, you’re aware that the Northeastern U.S. is now a breakaway Bible-based state called “Gilead,” that all college professors have forcibly been sent out to “the colonies,” and that Anchorage is now the capital of what remains of the United States. It’s a grim fact of life that all women in these parts have been forced to abandon their given names and renamed with Cotton-Mather-meets-J.R.R.-Tolkien handles such as “Offred,” the bewildered lead character portrayed in the show by Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss. Really, not since the nuclear-meltdown thriller The China Syndrome hit theaters two weeks before the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster has a piece of Hollywood entertainment arrived with such grimly apropos timing...

FYI, Elisabeth Moss is a member of the "Church" of Scientology. Which is rigid, authoritarian, puritanical, anti-gay, and which posits back-breaking servitude (in the Sea Org) as the most virtuous and estimable of human pursuits. Now, that's a dystopia--a real one. Not that the likes of Margaret Atwood would ever be brave enough to write a book about it.Update: Hey, who wouldn't want to see this?

One day, the Handmaids are brought to a “salvaging,” a ritual public execution where they are to told to encircle a man accused of rape and literally take him apart. “What you do is up to you,” says Aunt Lydia, as if that were empowering somehow, as if anything like that could possibly be true in the psychotic emotional prison where they live. Offred lands the first blow, a kick that sends blood spurting from his mouth, and continues until he’s dead. Is it catharsis, a way of lashing out at the only thing she’s allowed to hurt? When it is all over, Offred stand stunned, as though she does not quite know what she has done or why. “Are you alright?” Ofglen asks, as Offred stares in space with the same dead-eyed gaze she has when the Commander fucks her. As if anything like that could be possible.

Now, that's entertainment!BTW, the names "Offred" and "Ofglen" may sound Mather/Tolkeinesque (and that may well be the author's intention). However, this being a dystopia in which young, fertile women are slaves who are the property of men, the names betoken ownership. Hence, they are "of Fred", "of Glen," "of Tom, Dick or Harry."Dystopian? For sure. But there's no doubt that that idea of ownership sounds a lot more Wahhabi than Trumpian.

First, the pandering: Trudeau is in hot water over a photo showing him dining in the company of an alleged Tamil terrorist. (Hey, in Justin's Trudeaupia, one man's terrorist is another man's--a pandering politician's--photo op, right?)

Next, the privilege: Yesterday, the Prime Minister recounted the story of how his youngest brother, Michel (who, tragically, was killed in a skiing accident almost 20 years ago), ran afoul of the law when he was caught smoking pot. Their dad, Pierre Trudeau, made a few phone calls to the right people, and, poof, the charge went up in smoke (so to speak), thus sparing the youngest Trudeau a criminal record and his family the embarrassment of it.Justin was trying to make the point that the ordinary Joe Blow weed smoker who's charged with the same thing Michel was is unlikely to have the same sort of schlep, and, unlike his late bro, will be forced to face the consequences--and isn't that, like, soooo unfair?Unfortunately, Justin not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, thought he'd come across as empathizing with the hoi polloi whose fathers aren't former prime ministers. Instead, he ended up underscoring how there are two sets of law in the land--one for those born with silver spoons in their mouths, like Justin and his brothers, and one for ordinary schlubs who lack the Patrician Trudeaus' influence and connections.Seems to me Justin might have run that one by his communications experts before relaying it.

Not really. In fact, this Politico bombshell is pretty much what I'd come to expect from the duplicitous POTUS (whose bizarre soft spot for the Ayatollah was much scarier than Trump's freaky--and apparently short-lived--man-crush on Putin):

But Obama, the senior official and other administration representatives weren’t telling the whole story on Jan. 17, 2016, in their highly choreographed rollout of the prisoner swap and simultaneous implementation of the six-party nuclear deal, according to a POLITICO investigation.

In his Sunday morning address to the American people, Obama portrayed the seven men he freed as “civilians.” The senior official described them as businessmen convicted of or awaiting trial for mere “sanctions-related offenses, violations of the trade embargo.”
In reality, some of them were accused by Obama’s own Justice Department of posing threats to national security. Three allegedly were part of an illegal procurement network supplying Iran with U.S.-made microelectronics with applications in surface-to-air and cruise missiles like the kind Tehran test-fired recently, prompting a still-escalating exchange of threats with the Trump administration. Another was serving an eight-year sentence for conspiring to supply Iran with satellite technology and hardware. As part of the deal, U.S. officials even dropped their demand for $10 million that a jury said the aerospace engineer illegally received from Tehran.

And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”

Monday, April 24, 2017

In advance of a July 19 engagement to play at Park HaYarkon in Tel Aviv, Israel, dozens of musicians, writers, and other entertainment-industry professionals have signed a letter asking Radiohead to stay out of the country. Julie Christie, Eve Ensler, Thurston Moore, Roger Waters, and even the Archbishop Desmond Tutu all attached their names to a statement that reads in part: “Surely if making a stand against the politics of division, of discrimination and of hate means anything at all, it means standing against it everywhere — and that has to include what happens to Palestinians every day.”

The new open letter likened the current boycott efforts in Israel to artists in the 1980s refusing to play in South Africa until the country ended state-sanctioned apartheid. “By playing in Israel you’ll be playing in a state where, UN rapporteurs say, ‘a system of apartheid has been imposed on the Palestinian people.’” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore even added his own statement to the end of the plea, telling the band that refusing to play its July engagement would be “a small sacrifice in respect to those who struggle in honourable opposition to state-sponsored fascism.”

Moore and Waters inclusion in the open letter is no surprise, as both artists have a history of supporting Palestine. The former Sonic Youth singer previously joined the Artists for Palestine Pledge, which has more than 1,200 signatories who have agreed to accept neither funding nor “professional invitations” from any entity connected to the Israeli government. Waters, meanwhile, has been a vocal critic of Israel for years, and once wrote a letter to Bon Jovi saying that their insistence on playing in the country put them “shoulder to shoulder with the settler who burned the baby, with the bulldozer driver who crushed Rachel Corrie,” going on to list a handful of other very upsetting incidents.

Liberal MP Iqra Khalid attendedon Saturday, April 15, 2017 the annual Gala of the Palestine House marking the Land Day that symbolizes the Palestinian commitment to defend the land and to “liberate” Palestine. Fadlu Michael (فضلو ميخائيل), the chairperson of the Palestine House awarded MP Khalid a “thanks and appreciation” plaque (click HERE and HERE).

On January 18, 2016, MP Khalid met with senior members of the Canadian Palestinian community and board members of the Palestine House including its deputy chairperson Dr. Nazih Khatatba who serves also as the editor of Meshwar newspaper.

The Palestine House was de-funded in 2012 by the federal government for what then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney referredto as a “pattern of support for extremism.”

Minister Kenney’s spokesperson told The News via e-mail (February 2012) that “Palestine House has in the last few years aligned itself with terrorist causes, including celebrating the release of terrorists and honouring the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the groups that formed the Palestine Liberation Organization and in the 1960s and ’70s, was responsible for numerous armed attacks and aircraft hijackings.” In response Palestine House spokesperson Samir Jabbour said then that “Palestine House categorically denounces all forms of terrorism or extremism” and its “positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are in line with universal values of human rights… [and] “are very close to the positions of the government as stated on its website.”

“Activists of the Palestinian community in Erin Mills, Mississauga [Ontario] held an event honouring MP Iqra Khalid, who won the federal elections because of the voters from Muslim and Arab descent. The purpose of the event was to strengthen the relationship between the members of the [Palestinian] community and the Liberal members of Parliament.

“The event was attended by a large number of members of the Palestinian community who reside in this area and Arab journalists, in an effort to embolden and strengthen the standing of the [Palestinian] community in any future elections and to get involved in the political and social life of the Canadian multi-cultural society.

“The speakers at the event agreed unanimously to see this move as strengthening by itself the standing and the role of the [Palestinian] community and urging the [Palestinian] community to take advantage of its vote in any future elections, local or federal, in order to improve and strengthen our standing in the country in which we live and to get out of the shell and the encirclement and to become a part of the Canadian national fabric in our efforts to bring a better future for us and the next generations.”

Iqra's ties to Palestine House show where her head and heart are really at, and should have torpedoed her "anti-Islamophobia" mishegas before it ever came to a vote. That those ties were never exposed and used against the motion is evidence that the opposition--me included--wasn't fully awake.

In this portion of CBC radio show The 180, a Muslim PhD candidate at the University of Toronto "exposes" the "flaw" of our secular society (a society which frowns on, say, Islamic prayers in public schools).The supposed "flaw"?Why, the fact that our secularism is nothing more than Christianity in disguise, of course.We'd be much better off--and far more "inclusive"--says this chap, were we to "celebrate" everyone's holidays, as they do in New York City and, er, Trinidad.To recap: Christianity sucks; Islam deserves to be "celebrated"--in public and by the public. (And if you disagree, you're a Hatey McHaterson.)Update:Here's a cautionary tale of what happens when secularism recedes and a puissant Islam swoops in to take its place--not "inclusiveness," not multiculti "celebration." Sharia, plain and simple and draconian to the core:

For the past several months, eyes across the world have been trained on the growing far-right movementssweeping Europe and America — from the neo-Nazi groups in Germany and the United States, to the increasing popularity of France’s National Front.

But another, far less noticed — but sometimes equally-radical movement — is also emerging across Europe: the rise of pro-Islam political parties, some with foreign support from the Muslim world. And the trend shows no sign of stopping.

Holland’s Denk (“Think”) party, established and led by two Turkish immigrants, is among the most significant. Denk won three seats in the Dutch parliament last month, becoming the country’s “fastest-growing” new party, according to the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.

Its platform is to replace ideas of integration with “mutual acceptance” — a charming but antiquated idea in a culture where one group accepts gay marriage and the other is taught that homosexuals should be shoved off of tall buildings. It also proposes the establishment of a dedicated “anti-racism” police force...

The recent arrest of a woman doctor who performed FGM won't curtail the practice, writes a woman who was forced to undergone the painful and disfiguring procedure herself. The author of this piece on the Mother Jones site says she's a Dawoodi Bhora, an FGM-practicing Shiite sect based in Gujurat, India. And even though she and other American-born Bhora women had expected "khatna," as they call it, to die out once assimilation took hold, it hasn't, and there's no indication that it ever will:

We're the first generation of Bohras born in America. Our parents began settling here after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which brought a wave of South Asian engineers, doctors, and other professionals to America. In our teens and 20s, my friends and I who underwent khatna assured each other the practice would die out as Bohras assimilated. We're now in our 30s, and it hasn't stopped. Some women our age and younger are still arranging or considering khatna for their own daughters.

"For the longest time, I didn't even know other people had this done, too," one friend from the community told me. "I thought it was something my mom only did to me, and I didn't know why."

"Nothing is going to change," sighed the friend who called me to discuss the Nagarwala case. She spoke with a bitterness I could almost taste in my own mouth. "They'll use this one doctor as a scapegoat, let her take the heat, and pretend it never happened."

Four million people visit the memorial every year. School groups, tour groups gather near the northwest corner of the memorial, the informal meeting point, the informal photo vista; visitors pull out their phones, unpack their cameras; students look bored; teenagers jump from stele to stele until a security guard, who has the thankless job of stopping visitors from climbing on a Holocaust memorial, tells them to get down; parents shepherd their kids through the family vacation; children play hide-and-seek, play tag, play games incomprehensible to adults; teenage boys chase teenage girls, eliciting shrieks; boyfriends disappear into the grid, reappear around a corner, eliciting shrieks; weekend jet-setters debate plans for the night, flirt in broken English; girls tan on the slabs with their shirts pulled up to expose more skin, a couple takes a sun nap; photos are staged, iterated, dissected, restaged: curl the hair over my ear, two steps to the left, readjust my bra strap: 87 likes.

No sorrow. No pity. Just bored kids taking selfies.If that's what Holocaust remembrance boils down to, then why bother?

Friday, April 21, 2017

That's our old friend, Imam Syed Soharwardy of Calgary, channeling his inner Artie Erdogan, and tweeting/commanding an uppity infidel to cease and desist what he's doing.Soharwardy, who often appears on the CBC, is what passes for a "moderate" cleric here in Justin's Trudeaupia. Because even though he heads up something called the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (begging the question: is it the council that's "supreme," or the Islam?), he's not a big fan of violent jihad. (Well, after all, he is a Sufi, and jihad isn't in their wheelhouse, right?)He isn't averse, however, to employing The Big Sharia Shut Up on those who offend his religious sensibilities--Ezra Levant in the past; Mr. VP Mike Pence today. (I find it interesting that while Pence is trying to say that there's a "good" Islam and a "bad" Islam--the better to reject the "bad" one and to imply that Islam per se is not the problem--Syed is having none of it, insisting that Islam is indivisible. How that advances his cause, PR-wise, is anyone's guess.)Also, I have no doubt that, if he knew about it, Syed would object to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's categories of Islam, her being an apostate and all.

The Muslim World League (MWL) has praised the recent approval of a draft bill by Canada House of Commons that paves the way for future measures to combat the phenomenon of Islamophobia.

The League's Secretary General Sheikh Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa said in a statement that this draft bill comes in the context of awareness of the danger of religious hatred on the civilized behavior and societal peace, which helped the terrorist extremism to use "Islamophobia" as an excuse to promote its crimes.

What's that you say, Sec'y Gen Sheikh Dr. Al-Issa? You think that it's "Islamophobia" and not, say, the jihadi imperative embedded in Islam's holy writ that leads to acts of terrorism in which the phrase "Allahu Akbar" plays a prominent role?Who on Earth would make such a claim?Actually, where on Earth is more to the point. For while the Muslim World League sounds rather sporty, the reality is that it is anything but.

Abdallah Ben Abdel Mohsen At-Turki is the General Secretary.[2] The organization propagates the religion of Islam, encouraging Dawah and conversion of non-Muslims,[2] and promotes apologetics against criticism of Islam. The organization funds the construction of mosques, financial reliefs for Muslims afflicted by natural disasters, the distribution of copies of the Quran, and political tracts on Muslim minority groups.[7] The League says that they reject all acts of violence and promote dialogue with the people of other cultures, within their understanding of Sharia, but they are no strangers to controversy, having been the subject of several ongoing counterterrorism investigations in the U.S. related to Hamas, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.[8]

Seems to me that if this Wahhabist racket thinks your anti-Islamophobia effort is on the right track, it's a sign that you have taken a very wrong turn indeed.Update:BCF has more on these non-sporty Wahhabi charmers.

It boils down to a Marxist/sharia construct, i.e. "free speech" for me not thee, as Daniel Greenfield explains here:

Free speech is actually not at all endangered on campus, according to the Wellesley News which defines free speech as any speech that protects the underprivileged. The only free speech is left-wing speech. Any other speech is a form of oppression against the underprivileged who have the privilege of calling it out by harassing anyone who engages in it to protect their existence from your existence.

That includes lying down in the middle of freeway traffic so as to impede white supremacy by preventing teachers from getting to work, kids from getting to schools and ambulances from transporting dying patients to the hospital. This calls attention to the plight of angry African Studies majors who almost read “Between the World and Me” and named their gerbils after wanted terrorist Assata Shakur.

All non-social justice forms of speech are hate speech. These include supporting Trump, quoting the Bill of Rights or refusing to check your privilege. Checking your privilege determines how much free speech you really have. The privileged have the least free speech because of their burden of privilege and the underprivileged are privileged with the widest latitude of free speech.

This includes bursting into the library and shouting racial slurs while everyone is studying for their finals.

Objecting to racial slurs, death threats, fake hate crimes, machete attacks, pepper spray and/or arson is “tone policing”. Policing the tone of angry left-wing minority hooligans who have Tumblr pages full of clips from The Boondocks is deeply wrong and you need to check your privilege. They are already performing enormous amounts of “unpaid emotional labor” by just existing in white spaces and then trying to educate you about your privilege and their agony by yelling racial slurs in your face.

It doesn’t help when you refuse to be educated about your privilege and instead whitesplain, mansplain, hetsplain or cisplain to them about the challenges you have overcome. If you aren’t enduring daily “microaggressions” when people fail to use the correct personal pronoun that reflects your agender identity (Zer or Ler are both acceptable) then you have no idea how privileged you are.

Wow, if these are the best years of their lives, one can only pity the poor aggrieved.

"Islamophobia" is all about the unfair and unfounded "phobia" of utterly harmless Muslims, right?Well, not really, as someone who teaches a boffo course on "race, ethnic, gender and postcolonial studies" (not exactly an area of inquiry that is likely to land her students a decent job) at one of Ontario's august universities tells the National Post's Barbara Kay. Kay asked Jasmin Zine, who is something of an expert on the subject, to define "Islamophobia," which she did, lickety split:

“Islamophobia is a fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims that translates into individual, ideological and systemic forms of oppression.” This is quite an insidious, though admittedly clever, definition. Note that it puts “fear and hatred” of Islam, not Muslims, at the centre of the phobia. And the word “translates” is a masterstroke.

Under this definition, if I write publicly that Islam is inherently Christophobic and anti-Semitic according to its own texts, and a Muslim declares himself “oppressed” by my statement, who would be the interpeter for the alleged “translation”? The courts? Iqra Khalid? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

As one can see from her defined area of study, Zine is an intersectionalist, who sees the world in Marxist tropes of power and powerlessness, with white imperialists and their issue holding the power, and all disadvantaged minorities, into which category Muslims are now tucked, as the systematically disempowered.

Intersectionalists of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but...well, you have nothing to lose!

Update: No surprise that Zine's one of those anti-Zionist/pro-Palestine academics, as evidenced by her signing on to this petition.

Two aspects of Malala Yousafzai’s speech delivered to a packed House of Commons April 12 were notable.

The first was her failure to mention Stephen Harper, let alone thank the former prime minister who was behind the move to grant her honorary Canadian citizenship.

But it was what Malala said about Muslims and Islam that was both inaccurate and lacking in total honesty.

Referring to the 2014 killing of Canadian soldier Cpl. Nathan Cirillo by Muslim radical Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, Malala said: “The man who attacked Parliament Hill called himself a Muslim — but he did not share my faith. ... I am a Muslim and I believe that when you pick up a gun in the name of Islam and kill innocent people, you are not a Muslim anymore.”

The problem is Malala’s words, while eloquent, are in conflict with the reality of today, and incompatible with 1,400 years of Islamic history.

Yet it drew applause from the audience, hungry for any medicine that would dull the pain caused by the growing cancer of Islamic terrorism.

Everybody sing: "Just a spoonful of Malala makes the multiculti medicine go down in the most delightful way..."

According to the "expert" whose opinion was solicited for Ceeb radio's "Ideas" show, "political Islam" is an age-old phenomenon and, speaking realistically, an inevitability about which we infidels can do very little. So we may as well chillax and adopt the Ceeb's usefully idiotic Dr. Strangelove position. Which is to say: we must learn to stop worrying and love sharia (the installation of Islamic law in all its draconian glory being the whole point of "political Islam"/supremacist Islam/Muslim Brotherhood Islam/by-the-book Islam/the conquest-minded Islam of Islam's founder that inspires the bulk of the modern jihad). So nice of the Ceeb to celebrate shill on behalf of all that, no?

The default setting of the CBC is Justin Trudeau hard—which is to say squishy—leftist. That being so, the concept of "conservatism" is something that gives the Ceeb the heeby-jeebies. For, not only do Ceebers, marching in lockstep as they do to the received wisdom/magical thinking of their kind, not understand how anyone could actually be "conservative" (the left, as they see it, having exclusive occupancy of the moral highground), anyone actually willing to step up and identify as such is regarded as the most bizarre and exotic (and, of course, dangerous) of should-be-extinct creatures--on the order, say, of a ceolacanth.Here's an example of what I mean--a typical Ceeber "examining" (i.e. trashing) the idea of "reasonable conservative"; to the CBC, that phrase is the mother of all oxymorons.

Friday, April 14, 2017

As Alberto M. Fernandez writes, it shares more than you might think, and certainly more than most in the West are willing to acknowledge. The VP of MEMRI says that while ISIS differs from "other rival and contending Islamic entities," they all share "aspects" of the same worldview. One thing they share, for example,

is the ISIS view of the Other, of non-Muslims and of heterodox, free-thinking or liberal Muslims. The hostility ISIS shows for these "polytheists, infidels, and apostates" is often shared by its Islamist rivals and enemies, even if they may not act on this hostility with quite the same bloodlust.

The ISIS zeal in marking Middle East Christians for slaughter and their communities for destruction, whether in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, or elsewhere, is a case in point. ISIS Egypt's targeting of Coptic Christians at prayer in their churches – most recently on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017 – may seem particularly brutal and brazen, and it is.

But the ISIS actions to demonize and eliminate Christians from the region are broadly shared, less bloodily and brazenly but clearly, by a range of political players who are opposed to each other but somewhat similar in this one regard. Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and related Salafi-jihadis, may all hate and be hated by ISIS but all share some version of a bigoted Islamist supremacist ideology that spews poison against Christians and Jews and against any Muslims too openly identifying themselves as freethinkers or secularists or liberals.

These regional actors are all part of a broader social and political architecture which normalizes bigotry and internalizes hate, and which – because they are not guilt-ridden Westerners – they largely get away with in the eyes of a West desperate for Muslim allies and uncomfortable with defending Christians.[1]

In other words, the jihadist group perceived to be the worst of the worst at any given time (Al Qaeda some years ago, ISIS today) will suck up all the attention, thereby deflecting attention away from all the other awful Islamist groups. That, in turn, gives rise to the belief--the magical thinking, really--that all will be well if and when we defeat the one entity deemed most terrible. And when we maintain such a narrow focus, we end up ignoring the global nature of jihad, which makes it that much more difficult to vanquish.

Farzana Hassan wants to know why Iqra Khalid, the Liberal MP who spearheaded the Trudeau government's anti-Islamophobia motion isn't similarly concerned about those who do bad things in the name of Islam. Khalid, writes Hassan,

would have us condemn Islamophobia because she believes it is the ethical thing to do.

But what about her sense of fairness when it comes to recognizing and repudiating acts of Islamist violence?

To be logically and ethically consistent, she ought to have introduced motions condemning misogyny, FGM, terror, hatred and bigotry among the extremists in her own community.

The current parliament has seen the highest number of Muslim MPs - hardly a sign of systemic racism. Will any of these Muslim parliamentarians – Omar Alghabra, Salma Zahid, Arif Virani, Ahmed Hussen or Iqra Khalid herself and others– move to condemn terror on behalf of all Canadian Muslims? Anyone?

No collective blame is being assigned here. However, the old adage still holds true, that it is the inaction of good people that perpetuates evil.

True enough. But given the grave harm that M-103 is likely to inflict, it would be helpful to acknowledge that evil can also be perpetuated by the actions of the good, especially by those who like to bask in the glow of their own virtue signaling.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

On Wednesday, the venerable company released one of its highest-profile comics in recent months, X-Men Gold No. 1. Gold is the flagship series in Marvel’s so-called ResurrXion project, which seeks to make the X-Men great again by thrusting them into the spotlight with new creative talent and a big marketing push. This first issue, written by Arrow co-creator and longtime comics scribe Marc Guggenheim, sees the titular team relocated to the heart of New York City and attempting to regain a luster of optimistic heroism in a dark and confusing world. Penciled by Indonesian artist Ardian Syaf, it was thrilling and cheery, filled with hope and excitement.

Trouble was, it also happened to be filled with coded messages commenting on a vicious political conflict in Indonesia. The most notable message appears on the chest of Russian X-Man Colossus — while playing a game of softball with his teammates, we see the characters “QS 5:51” emblazoned on his jersey. One can forgive editors Chris Robinson, Daniel Ketchum, and Mark Paniccia for assuming those were just random letters and numbers drawn by a man from a country where baseball uniforms aren’t widespread. But no, they stood for Qur’an Sura 5:51 — a verse from the Islamic holy book.

That verse is difficult to translate precisely into English, and there has been an array of attempts over the years, many of which you can read here. Generally, it says something along the lines of what the Hilali-Khan translation schema maps out as “O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as awliya (friends, protectors, helpers, etc.), they are but awliya to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as awliya, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are the zalimoon (polytheists, wrongdoers, unjust).” Whatever your interpretation, it’s not very nice to Jews and Christians.

"Difficult to translate"? As if.I don't know what's worse: Marvel allowing itself to be used as a conduit for jihad/sharia, or the claim than an utterly transparent--and very ugly--passage of the Koran is subject to "interpretation."Probably a toss up, no?Update: Robert Spencer weighs in on the comic book kerfuffle.

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Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.